Socialist Spaces: Sites of Everyday Life in the Eastern Bloc1
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid
In 1976 the Russian artist Eric Bulatov produced the painting Krasikov Street depicting an unremarkable, modern Soviet street, lined with systembuilt housing blocks that were the hallmark of the late socialist cities of Central and Eastern Europe (Figure 1.1). The figures and traffic on this mundane stage move purposefully in a single direction into the canvas. But stepping out from a billboard towards them – and towards us, the
Figure1.1 Eric Bulatov, Krasikov Street, 1977, oil on canvas, 150 x 198.5 cm. Jane Vorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, The Norton and Nancy Dodge Collection of Nonconformist Art from the Soviet Union. Photo by Jack Abraham
viewers – strides the giant figure of Lenin. The street is thereby impregnated with the official ideology of state socialism, and yet the pedestrians seem oblivious to Lenin ’s presence. Bulatov ’s image is no politically orthodox treatment of the subject. Lenin, traditionally the personification of the Revolution, paradoxically closes off the horizon – according to the conventions of Socialist Realist painting, the locus of the radiant future.
‘ Taking to the streets ’ would hardly seem to be an action alien to Lenin; he was cast, often mid-stride, into the monuments and public art that punctuated the townscapes of the Eastern Bloc. Moreover, an ideal of collective movement had shaped the spectacles associated with the redletter days of the Soviet calendar. It had even determined urban reconstruction schemes after the Second World War, with new ‘civilian’ parade grounds such as Plac Defilad in Warsaw or Ploshad Lenin in Sofia being accommodated at the heart of the city (Figure 1.2). On these monumental sites, marchers were arranged to animate the city and to embody the inexorable force of history. Perhaps these great new public spaces might be understood as the most self-evidently ideological spaces where the collective identities of socialism were to be forged. But what of Krasikov Street itself? Who has even heard of it? Unremarkable in its very ordinariness, how might we recognize it as a socialist space?
Historian of technology Langdon Winner, in a celebrated essay of 1980, posed the question, ‘Do artefacts have politics?’2 Asking to what extent is power served by technological systems or artefacts, he explored the example of a bridge designed by Robert Moses, the urban planner responsible for the modernization of much of New York’s road network in the mid-twentieth century. This structure denied access to buses, and thereby those who could not afford to own a car, to a public beach. Through its control over space, allowing only those with private cars to go to the beach, the bridge – although not deliberately conceived as an expression of ideology – had political effects. Winner ’s question can clearly be understood as much as an enquiry into the political effects of space as of technology. It can also be reversed. Socialist Spaces, the title of this book, not only begs the question ‘Do spaces have politics?’ but also the converse: ‘Do politics have spaces?’3
The historical period under consideration in this volume – from the incorporation of the countries of Central and Eastern Europe into the ‘socialist space’ dominated by the Soviet Union to the dissolution of the Eastern Bloc between 1989 and 1991 – offers numerous examples that suggest that in the case of postwar socialism, the answer to the first question, ‘do spaces have politics?’, must be affirmative. From the formation of the Bloc (and earlier in the case of the Soviet Union), the ownership and
control of different orders of space, whether national territory, housing or public monuments, was socialized: that is, it was claimed by the State on behalf of the working people. The nationalization of land – and the way buildings and places were given new uses and meanings, even when the physical configuration of those spaces was little changed – indicate that space was subject to political interests. The period saw pervasive efforts to permeate not only places of work and public ceremony but also the most intimate spaces of the everyday with ideological meaning.
Figure1.2 The opening ceremony for the Palace of Culture and Science in the name of Joseph Stalin on Plac Defilad, Warsaw, 1955. Reproduced from Jan Jacoby and Zygmunt Wdowi ski, Pa ac kultury i nauki im. Józefa Stalina (Warsaw: Sport i Turystyka, 1955).
But what of the second question? Do politics have spaces? Is there anything about the physical or aesthetic qualities of particular spaces that might render one inherently socialist, another fascist and a third democratic? What might distinguish ‘ socialist spaces’ from any other? The question is not of mere academic interest but is one that exercised the socialist regimes of Central and Eastern Europe: how to distinguish the socialist space from earlier bourgeois or fascist configurations of the same terrain, and from that other political space, ‘the West’
Throughout the Bloc massive investment was made in the production of grand monuments and new public spaces to symbolize the new order. Parade grounds, public artworks and ‘people’s palaces’ formed a ubiquitous environment throughout the Bloc. Official discourse about these and other spaces reproduced the shared ideological priorities and tactical operations of the socialist regimes. Marxist-Leninist ideals of progress and principles of social justice, based on an equitable redistribution of all resources through the agency of the State, were claimed to be the basis of a new spatial economy. Measured against these ideals, such ‘ socialist spaces’ will no doubt be found wanting. To explore the political character of these spaces by reference to ideology alone would seem to be a fruitless task. Should we not, rather, consider a wider field of spatial relations, uses and discourses that goes beyond rhetoric? In expanding our frame of interest in this way, a picture of difference and change emerges that reveals space as a contested aspect of life in the Bloc. Much as authority sought to control the meanings and uses of space, the spatial practices of citizens were not contained by the party-state machine. But they were still made in relation to its priorities and tactics. If we can use the term ‘socialist spaces’ at all, it is only in relation to the shifting and multi-layered interaction between spatial organization, expression and use.
The essays in this book do not march shoulder-to-shoulder towards a unitary and universal definition of ‘socialist space’. Our aim is to bring new perspectives to bear on the formation, uses and representations of space in Soviet-type societies. Space is an elusive and heterogeneous concept that encompasses abstract order as well as the fields of ordinary experience. As such, it provides a common ground where different disciplinary interests intersect. Coming from diverse academic traditions including art history, social history and anthropology, each of the authors in this volume examines spatial practices and symbolic meanings within specific and concrete contexts under socialism, both monumental and ‘everyday’.
The political investment in the creation of highly symbolic construction projects such as the Moscow Metro or the new Socialist Realist
reconstruction schemes in the satellite states during the 1940s and 1950s has been illuminated by historians of architecture and town planning, who have demonstrated how the transformation of the urban environment was invested with ideological meaning. 4 A number of authors in this volume contribute to this growing literature. In ‘Accommodation and Agitation in Sevastopol: Redefining Socialist Space in the Postwar “City of Glory”’, Karl Qualls explores the ways in which competing schemes for the reconstruction of the important Soviet port city might be understood as ideological cartography. Adopting the commanding bird’s eye perspective enjoyed by Sevastopol’s planners in the 1940s, he explores how the postwar cityscape drew on wartime propaganda to mobilize national and naval myths. Reuben Fowkes, in his essay ‘ The Role of Monumental Sculpture in the Construction of Socialist Space in Stalinist Hungary ’ , shows how monumental sculpture in Budapest marked the political changes under way in Hungary in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Such sites were to be unmistakably socialist in that they were designed, in the first instance, as a measure of the triumph over fascism or, in the latter case, to demonstrate the State’s commitment to ‘social justice’.
As major state projects, postwar reconstruction plans and the ideological reinscription of the cityscape are perhaps most easily understood in terms of Eastern Bloc politics. Other contributors to this anthology address sites of everyday life under conditions of ‘ actually existing socialism’. How might the vision of a communist future, which Lenin personifies in Krasikov Street, be found in the ordinary spaces of life, whether outside on the urban street, or inside the public housing so prominent there? What claim do they have to be considered socialist spaces? Neither grand projects nor exalted spaces, the residential street and the home would hardly seem to count among the ‘sacred spaces’ of the socialist cosmos. Yet, it is a premise of this book that the spaces of everyday life – places of leisure, learning, consumption and domesticity – were no less important as sites for ideological intervention than the more obviously ‘socialist spaces’. Investigating such spaces as a route to a better understanding of the nature and experience of this social experiment, contributors to this book call into question the absolute status of the dichotomy of the great and the ordinary sites of socialism.
The Great Spaces of Everyday Life
Everyday life has increasingly been recognized as important territory for social enquiry. It has been the object of abstract exploration by philosophers
including Jürgen Habermas and Martin Heidegger, and of more concrete concern to sociologists like Erving Goffman. More recently, the social theorists Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre have enjoyed attention for the way their writings challenge the dismissal of everyday life as inauthentic or impoverished existence. 5 De Certeau ’s suggestive The Practice of Everyday Life (1974) has stimulated many rhapsodic investigations into subversion and dissidence in daily life in the face of the encroachments of technocracy and bureaucracy. The everyday has also become an important theme for some of the most stimulating research on the Eastern Bloc in recent years. Byt, the Russian for everyday life or the daily grind, has become a central term in studies of Soviet history and culture. Svetlana Boym has incisively analysed the ‘strong, almost romantic fear of banality’ in Russian and Soviet culture, which had hitherto left the everyday mythologies, rituals and spaces of ordinary life beneath discussion, deemed irrelevant for the apocalyptic self-definition of Russian culture and for Soviet teleology alike. As she demonstrates, these despised and neglected ‘ Common Places ’ are in fact fundamental to an understanding of Soviet Russian culture. 6 At the same time, historians of Stalinism have turned away from the near exclusive analysis of political decision-making to study also the everyday dimensions of ‘ordinary life in extraordinary times’, as Sheila Fitzpatrick has put it, or of ‘Stalinism as a civilization’ in Stephen Kotkin’s formulation.7 Furthermore, a number of commentators have recently remarked on the welling nostalgia in the former satellite states for the material culture of socialism in spite of the predominately negative attitude to their socialist, subaltern pasts. 8 The popularity of exhibitions in the 1990s in which interiors of Polish ‘Milk Bar ’ workers’ cafés, cinemas and homes from the 1950s and 1960s were faithfully reconstructed, or the packaging and products from the lost world of the GDR were displayed to large audiences has been a remarkable phenomenon. In a 1997 anthology of photographs and newspaper cuttings from the Kádár period in Hungary, Befejezetlen szocializmus ( Unfinished Socialism), András Ger and Iván Pet have argued that this nostalgia synthesizes memory and history. Many of the visitors to such exhibitions (and, of course, readers of their book) remember the period represented as their own everyday life while comprehending that they were also witnesses and participants in a ‘ great ’ experiment: ‘History is a process in which we continue to carry with us the time we believe to have passed...including everything from our material surroundings to memories, distilled into life experience.’9 As they realized, it is not only the extraordinary but also the ordinary qualities of socialism in Eastern Europe that need to be understood.10
No consensus surrounds the meaning of the term ‘everyday life’. It has generally been used, however, to signify private life as opposed to public actions; routine matters rather than extraordinary events; and cyclical time, associated with circadian rhythms, rather than what Lefebvre calls the ‘linear time’ of industrial society and teleological ideologies (not least Marxism-Leninism). Rita Felski, in a recent investigation of the historiography of the term, has suggested that everyday life is a secular and democratic concept because
it conveys the sense of a world leached of transcendence: the everyday is everyday because it is no longer connected to the miraculous, the magical or the sacred... Democratic because it recognises the paramount shared reality of a mundane, material embeddedness in the world... Everyday life does not only describe the lives of ordinary people, but recognises that every life contains an element of the ordinary.11
Does this characterization apply in equal measure in the so-called First World and Second World alike? Do the contours described by Felski plot the qualities of everyday life in the particular historical settings of socialist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Treating everyday life as an irredeemably profane phenomenon, determined entirely by the concrete or natural – a realm of daily transience ‘leached of transcendence’ – is particularly problematic in regard to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republics of Central and Eastern Europe. Under the ideological imperatives of socialism, phenomena that might otherwise be polarized – the utopian versus the ordinary; art versus routine; ideals versus experience – were to be synthesized. The socialist project was, after all, to make utopia real. If, for Felski, a common ordinariness is a feature of all lives, for socialist ideology the inverse was also true: every life contained an element of the extra-ordinary. Everyday life was not opposed to ideological life. On the contrary, it was a fundamental site of ideological intervention.12
The valorization of the ordinary is discussed by Katerina Clark in her seminal analysis of the mythic structure of the Socialist Realist novel. She diagnoses the ‘modal schizophrenia’ of this literary form: ‘its proclivity for making sudden, unmotivated transitions from realistic discourse to the mythic or utopian’, thereby collapsing the distance between ‘what is’ and ‘what ought to be’. Drawing on Mircea Eliade’s analysis of the dual sense of time characteristic of traditional cultures, she analyses the temporal structure of the novel in terms of a mythic ‘Great Time’.13 Events of the present, profane world become meaningful (or ‘real’ in Eliade’s terms) only insofar as they partake of the transcendent reality by imitating a mythical
archetype lodged in a historic past or an unspecified in illo tempore. No event of the present time could transcend its profaneness unless it could be dignified through identification with a moment either from the official heroic age or from the Glorious Future. Transposed to the Soviet context, that dignity was lent by a connection, however mythic, to the Great Time of Lenin or the radiant future of Communism.
The ontological and temporal hierarchy of present, profane time and Great Time has a corresponding spatial hierarchy based on structural equivalence or temporal projection. In Soviet discourse, ordinary spaces could become, by analogy with Clark, ‘ Great Spaces ’ through a connection with the ‘ grand spatial narratives ’ of socialism. Thus a steel foundry could figure as the ‘forge of communism’; a house commune as a microcosm of the socialist order; and a children’s after-school facility as a paradigm of the communist ‘city of the future’.14 At the same time, ‘social justice’, as conceived by Marxist ideology, demanded the ‘democratization ’ of space. Even the ‘ Greatest Spaces ’ – whether the new ‘people’s palaces’ of culture and education or landmark sites in Soviet history such as the Winter Palace in Leningrad – were ‘everyday’ in the idealized sense projected by the socialist regimes that they were to be used and possessed by all.15
The rhetoric of ‘social justice’ demanded the symbolic reordering of space in other ways too. As Fowkes shows, the destruction and erection of new monuments in the Hungarian capital after the communists had assumed power in the late 1940s might be read as a symbolic attempt to wrest the cityscape from its historic possession by the bourgeoisie. The major public spaces of Budapest, as the fastest growing European city in the nineteenth century, had been shaped first by the aristocracy and the business classes who thrived under the Habsburgs and then, in the 1920s and 1930s, by Miklós Horthy’s nationalist regime. If the spaces of this city manifested their roots in a reactionary past, the dynamic and teleological force of ‘progress’ could at least be made visible in the narrative form of monumental public art. In the Hungarian capital, as elsewhere in the Bloc, the task for architects and planners – as also for those charged with representing space textually and visually – was to reveal the interconnections of space and time: in other words, to demonstrate that historical forces were at work throughout and on the territories of socialism.
The establishment of socialist regimes was often characterized as a radical break with the past.16 But the urban spaces that came under their authority were not blank slates. Material traces of earlier eras inevitably remained. Urban reconstruction was as much about managing the meanings and associations of the historic city as it was about the modernization of the urban fabric. Although the strategies and techniques employed in
shaping these city narratives were diverse, ranging from the demolition of troublesome symbols to their discursive assimilation, the result was invariably one of simplification. However, cities do not readily lend themselves to this kind of monologic inscription. The material past was encountered in the everyday present in the forms of buildings and streets, and allowed the possibility for people to attach a range of meanings and memories that did not fit neatly with the official account.
The ways in which traces and spaces of the past were reworked or even effaced – both physically and discursively – in a city that was drawn into the Soviet sphere at this time is the theme of Olga Sezneva’s essay ‘Living in the Russian Present with a German Past: The Problems of Identity in the City of Kaliningrad’. The rewriting of the political map of Europe in the 1940s subjected many places to a dramatic reversal of power and ideology – typically from fascist to socialist authority. The renaming of space was a widespread means of representing such turns of history and creating a new sense of place. Yet Königsberg’s fate was shared by only a few cities, Breslau/Wroc aw and Danzig/Gda sk forming the strongest comparisons.17 The city’s annexation by the Soviet Union resulted in the exile of its German population: the same physical space was now occupied by different inhabitants as well as by a different ideology. The remaking of Königsberg as a Soviet place was conducted on two fronts: by the reconfiguration of its material space; and through new interpretations of the city’s history. Sezneva stresses a disjunction between the official and popular versions of the city ’s history and identity. In the official version, Kaliningrad’s past was reidentified with the imaginary community of the Soviet Union. In their everyday discourse, however, the Kaliningraders developed a different version, oriented towards Western Europe and drawing on Königsberg’s German heritage. Ruined remains of German cathedrals became the axis for this unofficial mythology and history. Analysing visual and textual representations of these ruins, Sezneva examines the way in which official and popular histories of Kaliningrad created rival versions of place.
The relations of core and periphery are also explored by Karl Qualls in his essay on the postwar reconstruction of Sevastopol. Qualls positions local interests against those of the centre by comparing different schemes advanced by authorities in the city itself and in Moscow. Unlike Kaliningrad in Sezneva’s account, where official and unofficial views are brought into conflict, Qualls ’s Sevastopol is the site of tensions and disputes within Soviet authority. In this Black Sea port the navy carried an authority that allowed a particularly ‘local’ narrative celebrating the city’s long history as a naval port to shape reconstruction plans after 1945.
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid
The struggle over the meaning of urban spaces is also the subject of Astrid Ihle’s chapter, ‘Wandering the Streets of Socialism: A Discussion of the Street Photography of Arno Fischer and Ursula Arnold’. She discusses the decentred representation of the socialist city, in this case Berlin and Leipzig, in the work of these two photographers. As she argues, their work represented a counter-image of the cities of postwar East Germany to the propagandistic images of heroic national reconstruction circulated in the official media. Where the latter figured the city as a sign of national progress and development, Fischer and Arnold focused on the disregarded aspects of urban life such as the mundane activities of day-to-day survival, thereby exposing the gap between the State’s rhetoric and the daily experiences of ordinary East Germans. Transposing the Baudelairian concept of the fl â neur from nineteenth-century Paris to the twentieth-century socialist city, and from a male to a female subject position, Ihle characterizes the photographers as dissenting eyes, who made the tragedy of the ruined city visible.
A shift of meaning, but of a different sort, took place even in those parts of the Bloc that had already been under socialist rule for several decades. There, the rupture was with Stalinism rather than with a capitalist past. The destalinization of an area of Moscow which in the early 1950s had become almost synonymous with the new building of Moscow State University – a late Stalinist gesture of imperial power – was effected during the Khrushchev Thaw by inserting, beneath its great tower, a new, state-of-the-art complex for the socialist upbringing of children. As Susan E. Reid discusses in her chapter, ‘Khrushchev’s Children’s Paradise: The Pioneer Palace, Moscow, 1958–1962’, the building of the Pioneer Palace reoriented the associations of its locality, the Lenin Hills, in directions more congenial to the post-Stalinist regime. But rather than denying its presence or competing with it on its own terms, the Pioneer Palace assimilated Moscow University into an image of modernity, rejuvenation, social progress and people-oriented values that accorded with the selfimage the Khrushchev regime sought to project.
Utopia
The Pioneer Palace was in many ways heir to a long tradition of utopian thought about the power of a harmonious, purposefully designed environment to bring about a perfect social order. Utopia, an ideal of impossible perfection, is by definition a non-place – a fictional island enjoying perfect government. For this reason utopianism was consistently denied
by socialist regimes which claimed to be constructing a perfect order in real, existing space; the ideal socialist society was not a utopia because it was being built in the present on the basis of objective laws of development. However, it was no secret that, just a year after the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin was inspired to launch his Plan for Monumental Propaganda by the seventeenth-century philosopher Tommaso Campanella’s vision of a ‘City of the Sun’, a city whose built structure determined the ideal organization of society, reinforced by edifying public art.18 In the 1920s, radical efforts to effect a total cultural revolution were premised on the principle of environmental determinism, which was rooted in late nineteenth-century design discourse but given new authority by the Marxist premise that matter determines consciousness. To change how a person thought and behaved one must change his or her material surroundings. Thus the architectural form of the city and planning of urban space were vested with a social-transformative role in the lives of its residents. The configuration of cities was ‘the strongest factor for organizing the psyche of the masses ’ . 19 The environmental determinism of the revolutionary avant-garde of the 1920s and first five-year plan was reinvigorated during the 1950s and 1960s. At a time of great political upheaval, it was recognized that if monuments and monumental space influence people ’s mentality, the monuments of the ancien r é gime –whether Stalinist or monarchist – could not be left in peace but must be either reconfigured or torn down and replaced.
Domestic space was a particularly important site for ideological intervention, both at the level of design and production, and at the level of representations and efforts to shape popular taste. As Stephen Kotkin has noted with reference to the 1930s, the ‘configuration of housing was a political determinant of consciousness and behaviour, including a person’s political reliability’.20 The realization that living space could be ordered and used for political ends became particularly important with the Khrushchev regime’s intense house-building programme. While taking measures to provide one-family flats for all, it also made the home and spaces of leisure – in addition to those of labour and political ritual –crucial sites for ideological intervention. The official faith in the capacity of the material environment to shape mentality was to some extent internalized and reproduced by ordinary people such as this young Soviet respondent to a questionnaire on ‘Your Ideas about the Young Family’ in 1962:
A separate, isolated apartment which opens onto a stair landing encourages an individualistic, bourgeois attitude in families – ‘my house!’ But soon it will
be possible to walk out of an apartment straight into a pleasant throughway with flowers and paths leading to the house café, the library, the movie hall, children’s playrooms. This new kind of housing will have an effect on the family spirit. The woman will no longer resist the idea of service installations and apartment house kitchens, saying: ‘I can do it faster myself at home!’ I know the time will come when a husband and wife moving into a new apartment will take along only a couple of suitcases of personal clothing, favorite books and toothbrushes.21
Public and Private
The challenge that socialist ideology apparently posed to privacy has long fixated Western observers. As Walter Benjamin claimed, on visiting the Soviet Union in 1928, ‘ Bolshevism has abolished private life. ’ 22 Benjamin had in mind the young socialist State ’s tightening grip on formal and informal cultural institutions, such as the café, the press and voluntary societies. The interests of the State appeared to have consumed private, domestic spaces. Benjamin describes how nineteenth-century apartments, once privately owned by the Russian bourgeoisie, had become common property and were now over-populated by numerous families and their meagre possessions. ‘Through the hall door one steps into a little town’, he wrote. This characteristically surreal metaphor, reversing inside and outside, significantly also convolutes what are conventionally the spaces of public and private.
During the Cold War period, the absence of privacy was the stock-intrade of Western indictments of Eastern European societies. Efforts by the Party and its agents to infiltrate the spaces, and influence the practices, of everyday life were identified as evidence of the ‘totalitarian’ character of these societies. As one Soviet agitational brochure of 1959 proclaimed in its title, ‘Everyday Life is Not a Private Matter ’ . 23 Thus Erich Goldhagen wrote in Problems of Communism in 1960 about ‘the discipline of leisure’ in the Soviet Union: ‘In the past few years the Party has evinced a growing concern with the uses to which Soviet citizens put the leisure gained by technological advances. For it is, indeed, endemic to a totalitarian regime that it insists on integrating res privata into res publica ’24
The limitations that the totalitarian paradigm placed on historical understanding of Soviet-type societies are well established and need not be rehearsed here. But notwithstanding the Cold War framework within which Goldhagen approached the issue, the efforts of states to absorb the private into the public realm remains a valid and necessary object of research.25 What is important in this context is that scholars have paid
increasing attention to the degree of negotiation that went on between State and people in the ascription of meanings to particular spaces, as well as to the resilience of counter-hegemonic practices, representations and memories. This book contributes to this important line of historical investigation and analysis.
The contributing authors attach varying meanings to private and public spatial practices in different settings. The identification of the home or dwelling with the realm of privacy is a relatively recent Western construction. Historically and geographically specific, it cannot be taken for granted in the context of socialism. Katerina Gerasimova and David Crowley both examine the limits of ‘privacy’ within public housing. In her chapter ‘Public Privacy in the Soviet Communal Apartment’, Gerasimova takes an ethnographic approach to public and private spaces in communal apartments in St Petersburg in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. She analyses the spatial practices of inhabitants of communal apartments, as well as the ways in which they describe this particular form of ‘communalism’. Forced into collective patterns of life and mutual dependency that were shaped by the space of the communal apartment, the inhabitants exercise mutual discipline upon one another. In their eyes, privacy is associated with an escape from this confining form of ‘home’. By contrast, Crowley’s chapter ‘Warsaw Interiors: The Public Life of Private Spaces, 1949–65’ examines public discourses about private life in Poland in the 1950s. The difference in the experience and attitudes to socialism in Poland and the Soviet Union is significant here. In this essay, his characterization of the public/private dichotomy extends not only to spaces and spatial practices but also to the public representations of ‘private’ experience. Contrasting the years before and after the political upheaval of the Thaw, Crowley stresses that the State reached a kind of accommodation with people’s demands for the spaces and material required to produce privacy.
To what extent should ‘private’ space be seen either as a ‘gift’ bestowed by the State in return for loyalty or acquiescence, or as an illicit haul? This issue is explored by Paulina Bren and Stephen Lovell in their contributions dealing with the weekend home in the Czech and Russian countryside respectively. The intense attachment felt by many city-dwelling Eastern Europeans towards their often small and primitive holiday homes in the mountains and forests has shaped their interconnected sense of selfidentity and place in ways that did not accord with the conventional socialist representations of the countryside. In ‘Weekend Getaways: the Chata, the Tramp and the Politics of Private Life in Post-1968 Czechoslovakia’, Bren contrasts two interrelated forms of weekend escape from
the city, the occupation of the chata, a home that had to be constructed within the resources and regulations of Czechoslovakia, and the practice of ‘tramping’, an unregulated and unsanctioned hiking in the countryside. Bren argues that widespread chata ownership was tolerated and even encouraged by the Czechoslovak communist regime – in spite of the drain that it made on labour and resources – in a deliberate effort to defuse unregulated tramping . But if the politics of ‘normalization ’ in Czechoslovakia produced encouraging conditions for chata ownership, such retreats were viewed with equivocation at other times and in other parts of the Bloc. In the Soviet Union in the early 1960s, Nikita Khrushchev campaigned against dacha ownership. The status of a building built with one’s own hands (or by privately sub-contracting labour) and dedicated to leisure, as Lovell shows in his essay ‘Soviet Exurbia: Dachas in Postwar Russia’, was at best anomalous in a society allegedly advancing towards collectivism. If the communal apartment, in Gerasimova’s analysis, was the space of ‘public privacy’ – however paradoxical that formulation might seem – dacha settlements were characterized, according to Lovell, by ‘ private publicness ’ , that is by forms of communality and sociability which – though tied to an official system of organization – allowed a degree of agency and autonomy on the part of ‘dacha folk’.
The conclusions drawn by our contributors cannot be aggregated into a picture of a monolithic socialist space, the Eastern Bloc. Rather, they collectively raise questions about the contrasting experiences of socialism in the satellite states and the Soviet Union, and of competing patterns for socialist space between the centre and localities. If the housing block – the building type most associated with the modernization of the urban landscape from the early 1960s – was made to almost indistinguishable blueprints throughout the Bloc, utilizing similar prefabrication systems, does it follow that the conceptions of domestic or ‘private’ life it was to accommodate were held in common too?26 We should be wary of overstressing a direct relationship of ideology – whether in terms of resistance or of determination – to the production and occupation of the sites of everyday life: longer historical processes were also at work, as Richard Stites has pointed out: ‘ not all the peculiarities of Russian spatial... culture are attributable solely to Soviet socialism.’27 The material heritage of buildings and streets that had been fashioned in very different historical circumstances, together with established ways of living – what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu would call ‘habitus’ – meant that many significant spatial practices such as those of ‘home-making’ in the Soviet Union and the People’s Republics cannot be described adequately in terms of either accommodation with or resistance to dogma.28 As scholars working on
the modernization of the home in Eastern Europe have noted, apparently new patterns of domestic ‘ occupation ’ sometimes reproduced older, established ways of living. Thus the spatial and social arrangements of communal apartments in the Soviet Union might reproduce the spatial and gender relations of the one-room peasant izba. 29 The discourse of the new apartment was, on one level, a campaign to inculcate modern habits of living in a recently urbanized people and, as such, was a response to the specificity of Russia’s demography.
If the traditional peasant habitus pervaded urban life in the Russian socialist city, to what extent did the experience of socialism, over seventy years in the Soviet Union and forty years in the Eastern Bloc, succeed in creating new kinds of subjects and shaping new consciousness? Space, as a number of contributors to this volume note, was a socializing project that undertook the formation of a new kind of person or moral subject. New ways of organizing the home, the workplace or the street would, it was claimed, produce new social relations that would, in turn, produce a new consciousness. What indications do we have that that the actions and behaviours of individuals were shaped by the spaces in which they lived and through which they passed every day? Perhaps most problematically, how can we calibrate the effects of socialist spaces?
It will come as no surprise that the research presented in this volume finds little evidence that the spatial project of socialism succeeded in making utopia reality. Authority’s investment in ‘environmental determinism’ appears to have produced limited social returns. On the contrary, if socialist spaces had any effect in shaping new social relations, then they must surely be held responsible for the failures of the system as much as for its achievements. Gerasimova, in her essay on the communal apartment, explores the tactics used by tenants to minimize the social tensions that accompanied the conditions of ‘public privacy’ forced on them by the shared occupancy of pre-revolutionary apartments. Far from altruistic communalism, the attitude of some tenants to their near neighbours is described as ‘ depersonalized ’ . Tactics of indifference and exclusion turned neighbours into ‘mere elements of the setting’ or, in other words, people into things.
If the effectiveness of ‘real existing socialist’ spaces in creating socialist subjects is in doubt, they were not necessarily anti-social. The queue was an institution of life under socialism and a spatial manifestation of the ‘economy of shortage’ that characterized all Eastern Bloc states. Albeit much hated and ridiculed, the queue outside the shop produced forms of sociality that might be coded to demonstrate the existence of values and a close-knit solidarity in spite of the alienating effects of socialism.30 In
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid
Poland, after the repression of the Solidarity trade union in the early 1980s, the control over the flow of goods into the shops was widely understood as oscillating between displays of relative largesse and punishment by ordeal. Consequently, the queue became a place to demonstrate resistance. Maintaining and even exaggerating polite social conventions in the queue was a signal of ‘Polish gentility’ and a silent rebuke to ‘Russian philistinism’. Neither anti-social space nor a socialist one, the queue and the forms of sociality it embodied were a real product of ‘real existing socialism ’ , albeit an unintended one. As these two examples suggest, much more analysis needs to be made of the movements, intentions and actions of agents within the spaces of socialist societies if we are to understand the complex relations of people to authority.
Spatial Practices
Dissent in Soviet-type societies is often identified with ‘the underground’, a term that expresses an ideological and social position through spatial metaphor. Not only does this label mystify the identities of those who acted against authority, but it also suggests a murky habitat of secret networks, shadows and prisons. Dissent did have its sites, of course, but they were often far more ordinary than the romanticized image of the underground would allow: kitchen tables, caf é corners and, as Bren shows, the countryside. Unregulated exchanges took place in the shadow of the monuments of official culture. Pushkin Square in Moscow was, for instance, a meeting place for subcultural groups in the 1980s. Young people would display their disregard for the socialist moral economy and official valorization of labour by spending hours ‘hanging out’, while others would trade currency illegally in the very places most charged with producing a socialist mentality.
While the leading voices of opposition may have vented their objection to state possession of space, figures like Andrei Sakharov or Mircea Dinescu rarely employed tactics of what might be called spatial dissent (though they were often physically marginalized by expulsion from the metropolitan centre as a punishment for articulating their views). In their commitment to charters and ‘samizdat’ publications, their dissent tended to be literary rather than embodied. However, numerous, less textual but none the less articulate ‘incursions’ into the public spaces of the Bloc occurred. These events used space to articulate suppressed views or challenge the legitimacy of communist authority. Jan Kubik, in his 1994 study The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power, has investigated a
series of public spectacles and monuments associated with Solidarity in Poland in the early 1980s.31 He charts how, despite prohibition, opponents of the regime ritualistically occupied cities like Craców and Pozna . Symbolic demonstrations of this kind drew on a commonly understood but repressed ‘map’ of meanings constituted by the historic fabric of the city. Not only was the body politic manifest in the hundreds of ordinary people who took part in these spectacles, but a set of spatio-historic associations was activated. In the same period, a group of young Poles known as Pomoranczowa Alternatywa (Orange Alternative) produced different forms of spatial dissent. In Situationist manner, they performed events from the history of the Bloc according to the official record.32 In 1987 hundreds of young men and women re-enacted the events of the October Revolution in Wroc aw to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the event. Cardboard models of the battleships Potemkin and Aurora sailed through the city streets while the crowd, dressed in red, shouted ‘revolution’, and a ‘Komissar ’s Revolutionary Council’ met in a pizza parlour. The Winter Palace was the local department store. Many of the participants were arrested, most singing the ‘Internationale’ as they were taken away. The city was not simply a convenient setting for a political carnival; Pomoranczowa Alternatywa ridiculed the regime’s continued rhetorical evocation of ‘the revolutionary spirit’ at a time when Poland seemed to have succumbed to consumerism. If Bulatov discovered Lenin on Krasikov Street, these young Poles found him in a pizza parlour.
Mark Svede, in the final chapter of this volume, ‘Curtains: Décor for the End of Empire’, reflects on spatial tactics that lie somewhere between the poles of spectacular irony and the sombre articulation of suppressed values. Exploring the history of the competition for the ill-fated Soviet Pavilion at Expo92 in Seville, he locates the winning entry by young Latvian architects within an indigenous, anti-colonialist tradition of ‘architectural expression of political dissent’ and a ‘facility for compromising monuments’. Riga’s main statue of Lenin had been employed as a prop in a popular theatricalization of the city; photographers – often ordinary Latvian tourists – aligned their cameras to make the leader of the Revolution hail the Orthodox cathedral behind or, later, the rehabilitated Latvian flag. Similarly, the Freedom Monument, which had been erected during the first period of Latvian independence in 1935, became a magnet for dissent during the 1980s. These Latvians produced unorthodox meanings for the city through their negotiations and use of space. Theirs was a kind of interpretative spatial practice in that they did not simply occupy space but, in a phenomenological sense, invested it with memory and imagination, conjuring up and exorcizing its historic ghosts.
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid
Svede’s analysis focuses on the Soviet pavilion for Seville, a building commissioned by major competition launched by major state bodies including the State Architectural Commission of the USSR in 1988. Most accounts of architecture locate the interests of architects and planners within the sphere of authority; indeed an international exhibition pavilion, patronized by the State, would seem necessarily to embody the close, intentional relations of architecture and political ideology. Not only were architects tied to socialist states by the latter ’s monopoly over resources, but architecture is intrinsically constructive and affirmative. Indeed, what could be more affirmative than an exhibition pavilion, charged in this instance with representing the banal credo ‘Humanity discovers the world and so achieves happiness ’ ? Yet, as Svede ’s attentive reading of the Latvian-designed Soviet pavilion shows, it was loaded with irony. His discussion raises the provocative potential of architecture to be the kind of critical practice that postmodern critics have repeatedly demanded in the West since the 1970s.33
The essays commissioned for this book open up a new dimension to the exploration of the complex and divergent experiences of socialism in Eastern and Central Europe by exploring the socio-spatial economy and its discursive formations. For, as Doreen Massey has claimed, ‘It is not just that the spatial is socially constructed; the social is spatially constructed too’.34 These essays together show that – whether at the most domestic, ‘private’ level of the home or at the most extended level of the nation – space played a fundamental role in the shaping of everyday sociality, large social formations, and indeed of socialism itself in the Eastern Bloc.
Notes
1.The concept of this book emerged out of a symposium organized by the editors, ‘Socialist Artefacts, Places and Identities’. This event was hosted by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in November 1998 with sponsorship from the British Academy.
2.Langdon Winner, ‘Do Artefacts Have Politics?’, Daedalus, 109, no. 1 (Winter 1980), reprinted in Donald McKenzie and Judy Wajcman, eds, The Social Shaping of Technology (London: Open University Press, 1985).
3.Raymond Stokes has explored these questions in relation to ‘socialist technology’. See his ‘In Search of the Socialist Artefact: Technology and Ideology in East Germany, 1945–1962’, German History, 15, no. 2 (1997), pp. 221–39.
4.For recent writing on the Moscow Metro see Studies in the Decorative Arts, 7, no. 2 (Spring-Summer 2000), a theme issue edited by Karen Kettering. For Socialist Realism, see A. Å man, Architecture and Ideology in Eastern Europe during the Stalin Era. An Aspect of the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992); Orszagos M emlékvédelmi Hivatal Magyar Építészeti Múzeum, Építészet és Tervezés Magyarországon 1945–1959 (Budapest: 1996); Radomíra Sedláková, ed., Sorela. esk á Architektura Pades á tych Let (Prague: N á rodn í Galerie, exh. cat., 1994).
5.Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Transaction, 1984); Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: California University Press, 1988).
6.Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934 (Evanston, IL: North Western University Press, 1999); N. B. Lebina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’ sovetskogo goroda: normy i anomalii, 1920–1930 gody (St Petersburg: Letnii sad, 1999).
7.Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain. Stalinism as a Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Konrad H. Jarausch, ed., Dictatorship as Experience: Towards a Socio-cultural History of the GDR (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1999).
8.Paul Betts, ‘ The Twilight of the Idols: East German Memory and Material Culture’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (September 2000), pp. 731–65; András Ger and Iv á n Pet , Befejezetlen szocializmus (Budapest: Te-Art Rt, 1997), published in English as Unfinished Socialism: Pictures from the Kádár Era (Budapest: CEU Press, 2000); David Crowley, ‘A Strange Nostalgia’, The Art Book, 8, no. 2 (March 2001), pp. 9–11; Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001); Vieda Skultans, The Testimony of Lives: Narrative and Memory in Post-Soviet Latvia (London: Routledge, 1998); Alon Confino and Peter Fritzsche, eds, The Work of Memory: New Directions in the Study of German Society and Culture (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 2002).
9.Ger and Pet , Unfinished Socialism, p. 5.
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid
10.For a related discussion of history and memory in the People ’s Republic of Poland see Tomasz Szarota, ‘Zycie codzienne w Peerelu – propozycja badawca’, Studia i Materia y, I (1995), pp. 201–15.
11.Rita Felski, ‘ The Invention of Everyday Life ’ , New Formations (Winter 1999–2000), p. 16.
12.See, for instance, Deborah Ann Field, ‘Communist Morality and the Meanings of Private Life in Post-Stalinist Russia, 1953–1964’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1996); Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999); Victor Buchli, ‘Khrushchev, Modernism and the Fight against Petit-bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home’, Journal of Design History, 10, no. 2 (1997), pp. 161–75; Karen Kettering, ‘“Ever More Cosy and Comfortable”: Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928 –1938 ’ , Journal of Design History, 10, no. 2 (1997), pp. 119 – 38; Susan E. Reid, ‘Destalinisation and Taste, 1953–1963’, Journal of Design History, 10, no. 2 (1997), pp. 161–75; Olga Matich, ‘Remaking the Bed’, in J. Bowlt and O. Matich, eds, Laboratory of Dreams. The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 59–78.
13.Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel. History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981, 1985), pp. 38–41; Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, ed., Willard R. Trask (Pantheon Books, 1954 (second printing, 1965)).
14.Eliade wrote ‘The world that surrounds us, in which the presence and work of man are felt, has “an extraterrestrial archetype”, be it conceived as a plan, as a form, or purely and simply as a “ double ” existing on a high cosmic level. Reality is conferred on objects, buildings, spaces through repetition of a celestial archetype.’ Eliade, Myth of the Eternal Return, p. 8.
15.Anne White, Destalinization and the House of Culture. Declining State Control Over Leisure in the USSR, Poland and Hungary, 1953–1989 (London and New York: Routledge, 1990).
16.Warsaw presents the example where, perhaps, the greatest ideological investment in the image of the city’s complete destruction during the war was made. See Jerzy S. Majewski and Tomasz Markiewicz, Warszawa Nie Obdudowana (Warsaw: DIG, 1998).
17.See Carl Tighe, Gda sk. National Identity in the Polish-German Borderlands (London: Pluto Press, 1990); Norman Davies and Roger Moorhouse, Microcosm. Portrait of A Central European City (London: Jonathan Cape, 2002). Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires, Space and Place. Theories of Identity and Location (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993), p. X.
18.Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), The City of the Sun: A Poetical Dialogue, trans. D. Donno (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). Khrushchev acknowledged the contribution of the utopian socialist tradition in his report to the Twenty-Second Party Congress in 1961. In this, he made reference to Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Campanella and More, although he added the caveat that ‘only Marx, Engels and Lenin created a theory of scientific communism and pointed out the true paths toward the establishment of a new society’ Khrushchev, cited by Jerome M. Gilison, The Soviet Image of Utopia (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975). Campanella’s Città del Sole was republished in Russian translation in 1947. It was invoked favourably in discussions promoting the synthesis of architecture and monumental art in the context not only of the Moscow Pioneer Palace but also of new projects for a Palace of Soviets. E. N. Sil ’ versan, Dvorets Sovetov: materialy konkursa, 1957–1959 gg. (Moscow, 1961), p. 33.
19.Stephen Bittner, ‘Green Cities and Orderly Streets. Space and Culture in Moscow, 1928–1933’, Journal of Urban History, 25, no. 1 (November 1998), p. 24.
20.Stephen Kotkin, ‘Shelter and Subjectivity in the Stalin Period: a case study of Magnitogorsk’, in William Craft Brumfield and Blair Ruble, eds, Russian Housing in the Modern Age. Design and Social History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press / Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1993), p. 174.
21.A response to the survey ‘ Your Ideas About the Young Family ’ , conducted by the Komsomol newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda. Translated in The Soviet Review, 3, no. 8 (August 1962), p. 32.
22.Walter Benjamin, ‘ Moscow ’ (1927), in One Way Street (London: Verso, 1979), pp. 187–8.
23.O. Kuprin, Byt – ne chastnoe delo (Moscow: Gospolitzdat, 1959).
24.Erich Goldhagen, ‘The Glorious Future – Realities and Chimeras’, Problems of Communism, 9, no. 6 (1960), p. 7.
25.See O. Kharkhordin, ‘ Reveal and Dissimulate: A Genealogy of Private Life in Soviet Russia’, in J. Weintraub and Krishan Kumar, Public and Private in Thought and Practice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 333–63.
26.See A. Ludwig and M. Strumpfe, Tempolinsen und P2 Alltagskultur der DDR. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung (Berlin: be.bra Verlag, 1995).
27.R. Stites, ‘Crowded on the Edge of Vastness’, in J. Smith, ed., Beyond the Limits: The Concept of Space in Russian History and Culture (Helsinki: Studia Historica 62, 1999), p. 259.
David Crowley and Susan E. Reid
28.Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 79–87.
29.Buchli, Archaeology of Socialism, p. 156; Boym, Common Places, p. 151.
30.On the social institutions connected to the queue, see Janina Wedel, The Private Poland. An Anthropologist’s Look at Everyday Life (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1986).
31.Jan Kubik, The Power of Symbols Against the Symbols of Power (Boulder: Penn State Press, 1994).
32.B. Misztal, ‘Between the State and Solidarity: one movement, two interpretations – the Orange Alternative Movement in Poland’, The British Journal of Sociology, 43, no. 1 (March 1992).
33.See, for instance, Frederic Jameson, ‘Is Space Political?’, in Cynthia Davidson, ed., Anyplace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 192–205. See also Andrei Bokov, ‘ Enriching our Fantasy’ , in Catherine Cooke, ed., The Uses of Tradition in Russian and Soviet Architecture (London: Architectural Design, 57, no. 7/8, 1987), pp. 39–46.
34.Doreen Massey, ‘Introduction: Geography Matters’, in Doreen Massey and John Allen, eds, Geography Matters! A Reader (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 6.
Accommodation and Agitation in Sevastopol: Redefining Socialist Space in the Postwar ‘City of Glory’
Karl D. Qualls
In late 1949 city officials stretched a banner that read ‘SEVASTOPOLIANS! What have you done for the restoration of your hometown’1 across one of the most heavily travelled streets in the Crimean port city of Sevastopol. It spoke volumes about the city and its transformation during the five years after liberation from a two-year Nazi occupation. To the social, psychological and physical damage caused by revolution, civil war, collectivization, industrialization and purges, war scars added one more trauma. When, after the war, the regime asked how it could repair the damage, it found the answer in urban reconstruction.
The process of replanning and rebuilding cities after the devastation of the Second World War was one of many ways by which the Soviet partystate attempted to repair its image in the eyes of the population after nearly thirty years of disorientation. The creation of socialist spaces was part of a larger project of creating a new system and a new society, but the process and rationale are still poorly understood. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, not only in regard to the well-known 1935 General Plan for the reconstruction of Moscow, but also to the revitalization of other cities, architects and ideologues debated the future face of Soviet urban space. Many planners wanted a socialist space that met the population’s needs through communal living, eating, childcare, laundry and more. The counter-view sought monumental architecture that would serve as symbols of power and representations of the Soviet state and its institutions, with the names and statues of Marx, Engels and other socialist luminaries prominent throughout. What transpired was a combination of pre-revolutionary and NEP-era utopian-idealist schemes for the new city all bundled up in the latest verbiage about the socialist system’s concern for the population’s wellbeing. Much as steel had become the trademark
of progress in the 1930s, in the postwar decade officials used reconstructed buildings and revitalized cities as symbols of progress and economic strength. New buildings rising from and above the ruins offered more than space for housing, production, convalescence and education. Each new building represented progress, healing and recovery. The city’s new planners, moreover, diverted huge sums of money to massive and ornate structures that symbolized the regime’s public pronouncements of concern for the population. Theatres, cinemas, hospitals and hotels, built in a neoclassical style, became the centrepieces of the city. This feat of rebuilding, often compared to the valour and sacrifice attending military victory, became one focus of persuasion in Stalin’s last decade. Each new building was hailed as another ‘ victory ’ (rarely abandoning military terminology) for Soviet city building and for society in general. 2 The delayed Pyrrhic victory over Nazi Germany left numerous cities ravaged; the ‘victory’ of construction sought to heal those wounds.
The model settled on by the mid-1930s was carried out on a massive scale after the Second World War, but the vast destruction allowed for further negotiation among residents, architects and institutions of power on how cities would be raised from their ruins. With numerous military and industrial cities almost completely destroyed, the regime was willing to bend its stated policies if this would ensure rapid reconstruction and a mollified population. Five years after Sevastopol’s liberation from German occupation and the beginning of reconstruction in the war-ravaged city, urban planners began to use the appeal of particular geographic places as a tool to motivate greater effort for construction of a new socialist space. However, this had not always been the case. Local citizens and officials opposed the projected future face of the city – emanating from Moscow – that sought to marginalize local history and tradition while centring Soviet institutions and the history of socialism and the USSR in the heart of the city. Local opposition initiated a connection with the hometown, its tradition and heritage by preserving and resurrecting pre-revolutionary names and buildings and placing the seats of Soviet institutions in their shadows. Maintaining schools, hospitals, housing and more remained consistent in all plans, but the socialist space was redefined from one that excluded much of the urban biography in favour of honouring the Soviet and socialist past to one that interwove Soviet history with a longer local history. Although the regime had intended the plans designed in Moscow by award-winning architects to become the blueprint for the reconstruction of other provincial cities that had suffered so much devastation during the Second World War, the idealistic plans conflicted with local desires to rebuild and remember a more familiar city. This process of
Accommodation and Agitation in Sevastopol
negotiation was long and arduous, but eventually, in Sevastopol at least, local interests won out over central dictates. Socialist space became the buildings of Party and government and the occasional invocation of Lenin surrounded and intersected by sites of and monuments to prerevolutionary lore. ‘Soviet’ and ‘socialist’ were at harmony with a selectively created and remembered past.
Accommodation and Agitation
Soviet social and political policy has sometimes been described as ‘bread and circus’, a duality whereby the population is both appeased and entertained. ‘ Accommodation and agitation ’ seems, however, to be more reflective of a broader set of policies.3 Accommodation represents a series of policies satisfying the basic needs and wants of a population, keeping it content and maintaining the illusion of socialism’s superior humanity. The cradle-to-grave system of social welfare and services provided benefits to single mothers and their children, down-on-their-luck workers, Stakhanovites and shock-workers, widows and orphans. Agitation means a simple and popularized propagation of political, social and/or cultural messages that seeks not just to convince, but also to motivate further action.
In postwar urban reconstruction, these methods took on various forms. Accommodation was an attempt to meet the immediate needs of a city and its residents, but also to incorporate, and thus validate, ‘local’ practice and tradition. Accommodating the population’s psychological needs was as important as meeting its physical demands. Agitation, on the other hand, included the discourse and practices of moulding the myths of a glorious past and the power of the Soviet present with the future promise of the great Soviet experiment. Agitation in the context of postwar urban reconstruction created an alternative reality, a mythology based on tradition and ideological aspirations for the future. Hoping to encourage further effort for reconstruction, the architects and officials who redesigned Sevastopol after the Second World War created an aesthetic matrix of monuments, buildings, squares and streets honouring the heroes of the ‘two defences’ of the Crimean War and Great Patriotic War. Using the awe-inspiring architectural forms of the city’s ancient Greek heritage, designers combined images of patriotic heroes with the legendary martyrs of two revolutions and a civil war. This form of agitation through incorporating an existing set of myths was also a method of accommodating residents’ desire to live in a city that was familiar to them, not one radically changed.
Accommodation and agitation were not mutually exclusive; often they overlapped. For example, as with carefully designed buildings, architects paid close attention to the design of parks. In their purest form, green areas in cities provided space for recreation, relaxation and communing with nature and fellow citizens amidst the asphalt and concrete. Parks also occupied a central place in health maintenance (zdravookhranenie) plans. They provided fresh air and exercise to urban dwellers who could not escape to dachas. Moreover, parks served an important agitational purpose. Not only did they project the image of a state concerned with the health and welfare of its citizens, but also the addition of historical monuments linked those who strolled in the present with the heroic defenders of the Motherland who had lost their lives on battlefields past. When parks and monuments were preserved or rebuilt they only furthered the local population’s identification with a familiar urban biography.
As architects proposed additional spaces for recreation, leisure and entertainment, the glorious past and future of Sevastopol was seen to rise from the ashes. Agitation was meant for mass consumption as a tool for aesthetic persuasion that utilized easily understood symbols of power and strength and was devoid of abstract (and unintelligible to most) political theory more common in written propaganda, which was meant primarily to persuade rather than encourage action.4 Monuments, memorials and historical architecture supplied the regime with omnipresent symbols of Soviet power and a history of heroic actions around which the population could rally. Moreover, the style and monumental scale of construction represented the power, stability and economic viability of a country and system devastated by war. Accommodation in city services and housing planned to improve the standard of living of the population, thereby avoiding urban unrest and, more importantly, proving that MarxismLeninism-Stalinism could provide the best possible life for people. The Revolution’s true believers had not yet seen the fulfilment of the social(ist) contract: if the State provides for the population’s welfare, the latter will work and sacrifice for the creation of the communist society.
For both agitation and accommodation, the city centre was most important because it was the locus of city services and the party/state institutions, it was the most visible and travelled region of the city and it contained numerous historical sites. If one lived in the city centre or travelled there to work or to conduct business with the authorities, one was brought into contact with the first stage of postwar reconstruction. Planners looked first to the urban core both because the concentrated construction was more economical and efficient, but also because restoring the institutions of power, essential city services (e.g. water systems,
hospitals, schools) and leisure activities (e.g. parks, theatres, museums) restored a sense of normalcy to a bomb-ravaged city and more quickly showed that through Soviet power a city could rise from its own ashes.
Sevastopol Before Reconstruction
Since the fifth century BCE the region surrounding present-day Sevastopol has served as a trading port for Greeks, Tatars, East Slavs and others. In 1783, Catherine established the city of Sevastopol, on the site of the ancient Greek city of Chersoneses (Khersones), as a Russian trading port and naval outpost against the Turks. But before the Second World War, Russians, Turks and Europeans remembered Sevastopol as the bloody battleground of the Crimean War. The costly war of attrition against disease, as much as enemy fire, became the focal point of the city’s identity. In the last decade of the nineteenth century, naval, municipal and imperial officials commissioned statues and monuments to the ‘ great defence ’ of Sevastopol. Although Russia suffered great losses, the Crimean War demonstrated the power of a strong fortress and population. Thus, Sevastopol’s heroic image served as the foundation on which the Soviets later built the myth of Red Sevastopol.
As the Crimean defence was being immortalized in stone and marble, revolutionaries arose in Sevastopol. Beginning with the mutinies in the Black Sea Fleet in 1905 and 1917 and then the 1919 insurrection against General Petr Wrangel and his men, Sevastopol gained its reputation as a bastion of the Revolution and defender of Soviet power. Operation Barbarossa in 1941 became yet another touchstone for fortress Sevastopol. Like the sailors who had established Soviet power in the city, their successors had to defend both Sevastopol and the nation from German invaders. After the lightning-quick and highly destructive Nazi offensive against the home of the Black Sea Fleet in November and December 1941, mythmakers in the Soviet press began to link the heroic midnineteenth-century defence of the city with the battle at hand.5 All the themes of the Crimean War – heroism, self-sacrifice, disease and homelessness – were resurrected in the 1940s.
The scale of damage resulting from 250 days of siege and a two-year occupation in Sevastopol is simply unimaginable. Of 110,000 Sevastopolians, only 3,000 remained until liberation and 24,600 had been carried off to Germany as captive labour. 6 Residents returning from evacuation soon found that their homes had fared little better than the city at large. Only 1,023 of 6,402 residential buildings were habitable and
Karl D. Qualls
only seven half-destroyed buildings remained in the city centre. The long German siege and the Red Army’s return to the city two years later took its toll on Sevastopol’s infrastructure as well. German forces destroyed the city ’s water system, shelling wreaked havoc on sewers, retreating forces cut phone and telegraph lines, special battalions destroyed railroad tracks and tunnels and Nazi rail cars hauled industrial equipment –including some of the city’s electric generators – back to Germany. All told, Soviet officials claimed a loss of 25 billion roubles.7 So thorough was Nazi destruction, however, that little remained in the city to meet even the most basic human needs. Water and sewer systems, electrical stations, flour mills, breweries and food processing industries were ruined and human faeces floated in one of the city’s central bays.
Spatial Organization
On and around the central hill of Sevastopol one finds remarkable examples of the process of accommodation and agitation in the postwar design of a city with several loci of identification (Figure 2.1). Vladimir Cathedral, although damaged by war, remained the visual centrepiece at the highest point on the central hill. Nearby, a complex of naval administrative buildings pointed to the city ’s military identity. On the ring road surrounding the hill, the offices of the Party and of government stood near centres of entertainment such as theatres. Throughout the city were monuments and statues to admirals and heroes of socialism. The new socialist space in postwar Sevastopol was dominated by various symbols
Figure2.1 Central hill taken from Artillery Bay. Note the statue of Lenin with arm outstretched with Vladimir Cathedral to the right and a large naval complex to the left. © Karl D. Qualls, 1997. All rights reserved
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over a hundred and one things. Politically, Europe will be back in the middle ages, while economically it is in the twentieth century.”
The crowning heresy to McCall and Hamilton came when Levin proclaimed Bismarck a greater statesman than Wilson, because he unified Europe, while Wilson divided it.
“At any rate,” said Hamilton at length, “we three are united by a common love of our country and by certain common ideals. We may not agree as to whether the war has brought those ideals any closer to humanity or not, although personally I think it has. But we do know that these ideals are ours—America’s.”
“Yes,” said Levin, “and we are a little cross-section of America— Catholic, Protestant and Jew but an unusual cross-section. Wait until you see the reaction in this country. The Italians are crying for Italia Irredenta and Italy for the Italians. Poland is crying Poland for the Poles. And the hundred per cent Americans have already begun raising the same cry here. Of course, we’ve missed them while we were in France; but the hundred per centers were the men back home that kept the homefires of hatred burning—painting yellow signs on German bakers who didn’t invest a certain quota of their savings in Liberty bonds, boycotting Hungarian restaurants, refusing to eat German fried potatoes or listen to Wagner—stupid things like that. But there were more important things, too, deprivation of the right of free speech and assembly, and suppression of newspapers.”
Hamilton remembered some of the letters Margaret had written.
“Well, wasn’t it necessary to protect the country at home from disaffection?”
“In certain cases it was, certainly,” said Levin. “But in many cases—I won’t say ‘most,’ it wasn’t. That sort of thing grows. It becomes a passion, a religion, like Sadism, of inflicting punishment. Psychopathically it has an interesting explanation. Politically it is dangerous. There is no doubt that many persons derive keen pleasure in hurting others. And the war has stirred them up.
“At first this intolerance is fairly reasonable—it makes powerless the enemies of the government in the prosecution of war. Which is as it should be. Then it becomes ingrown. Instead of imprisoning traitors as they arise, people begin to stir them up so that they may satisfy the pleasure of imprisoning. Men begin to watch their neighbor for slips from the patriotic code. A patriot must do this thing and that and refrain from the other. There may be five hundred different kinds of patriots in actuality just as we three represent three different points of view and political philosophy. But the hundred per center can understand only one kind—his own.
“He is a Republican—I am myself, by the way—so when he finds an Anarchist he has him jugged. It makes no difference whether he be a philosophic Anarchist, a follower of Kropotkin, a man who is a vegetarian by principle and has a Brahministic horror of shedding of blood—he is placed in the same cell with the brute who was caught placing a bomb under the railroad bridge. Socialists, Communists, I. W. W.’s, sympathizers with the present Russian government all, in some way different from the hundred per centers—are regarded as enemies of America. Even liberals and progressives are viewed with suspicion.
“By January the country’s going dry. The same bigots who have been denying the rights that the Constitution guarantees every citizen in a misguided effort to protect that Constitution, will be denouncing people who prefer to drink cocktails instead of grape juice, as un-American. Next it will be people who don’t belong to their race and then, to their church.”
“No, never!” Hamilton interrupted. “This isn’t Russia. America is too sensible.”
“I’m Russian by parentage, you know,” said Dr. Levin. “The race riots there, the pogroms, were also supposed to be patriotic. It was always the hundred per cent Russians who incited the hooligans to riot. Imagine that! The officials who were living corrupt lives, looting the public treasury, depriving the soldiers and sailors of food and ammunition to swell their own fortunes, those were the ones who
always cried Russia for the Russians. In the name of patriotism they not only killed the Jews, but imprisoned, exiled and killed the real patriots, who were working for a republic. You see it always starts with patriotism. And in Russia the idea of religion was mixed in with it. Those who don’t believe as you do are not only enemies of the state, but also of Christ. The victims of the plunderers and murderers become anti-Christs. It’s ironic.”
“I think that’s just a wild dream of yours. But whatever happens”—he raised a glass of champagne—“here’s to our friendship, born of the war to make the world safe for democracy.”
He proposed the toast jocularly, but it symbolized the moment and they drank, almost seriously.
XIV
At the Century roof garden they sat back and watched the spectacle critically.
“It hasn’t the verve of a Paris performance,” remarked McCall.
“Verve—you mean nerve,” replied Hamilton. “But the cocktails are there. Anyway, I like this better.”
“That’s because you’re a Puritan. In Paris you were always being shocked by the exhibitions.” McCall winked at Dr. Levin, who was listening with a smile on his face.
“Ah, yes, a Puritan who drinks cocktails. I don’t mind an exhibition of legs, if they’re good legs—as these are. But in Paris they went too far. Legs were a mere starter. Whenever a person exhibits a moral impulse, you accuse him of being a Puritan.”
“Exactly,” said McCall. “You don’t expect me to call you a goddam prude in company. A person has to be polite. Puritan is merely a euphuism.”
They argued genially for a while and then appealed to Dr. Levin.
“As usual, you are both wrong—and both right,” said Levin, lighting a cigarette. “McCall is a poet and a symbolist. In what to you, Hamilton, would be a shocking disregard of the morals, and to me a mere display of the umbilical region, becomes in McCall’s mind a symbol of freedom, of art, of life. But we’ve sat here almost an hour and it’s time to be moving.”
At the Moulin Rouge, dimly lighted, with soft lights and women’s gowns and jewels glowing subduedly, McCall passed into a sentimental mood.
“Want to hear a little poem I wrote? Wrote it to the sweetest little girl in the world, wrote it on the back of an old envelope one day in the hospital.”
McCall was having difficulty with his “l’s.” A woman with seductive arms and eyes leaned over to him from the next table and smiled, while her escort was fumbling in his pockets for some change.
“She’s the sweetest little girl in the world and I’ll never see her again—never.”
“What’s the matter? A lover’s quarrel?” asked Levin.
“No.” Morosely.
“Where’d you meet her?” asked Hamilton. “That’s a new one on me. Paris?”
McCall nodded. He sipped a highball, ran his fingers through his hair and began in a low, vibrant voice, his handsome boyish face flushed.
“Theagèdpilgrimhastensontheroad, Norstopstoplucktheflowersbytheway LestDeatho’ertakehim’erethecloseofday Andfind,toolate,unreachedthesoul’sabode.
“I,too,apilgrim,love,withquickfootstrode AlongLife’shighway:OftenwouldIstay Toliveablissfulhour,forever.‘Nay. On,on!’criesTime,andsmiteswithpainfulgoad.
“Theysaythough,thatbeforethesoulisfled Fromthisfrailhouse,oldTime,turnedkind,willbring, Inoutstretchedarms,thosehappyhourslongdead— Asheafofgoldenmomentsspentwiththee, Thetenderblossomsofourhopefulspring And,hereandthere,ascarletmemory.”
McCall’s voice stopped. His long, slender fingers went forward across the table and he sat staring down in front of him. A waiter who had been standing near-by in respectful silence, coughed. The lady at the next table, looking haughtily ahead, swept by with her escort.
“It’s very pretty,” said Hamilton after a moment.
“Yes, I like it,” added Levin. Then with apparent irrelevance, “I suppose you know that Miss Meadows is here, in New York.”
Hamilton betrayed his eagerness in a look.
“No, where is she?”
McCall was still staring at the table.
“She’s staying with a party of Red Cross nurses. Her parents met her in New York, but went back alone. Of course you’ll call on her. I know she’d be glad to see you.”
They walked out of the room together, McCall between them, still absorbed in thought. His mood changed, however, at Reisenweber’s. Opposite them sat a fat man in full-dress, with a chorus girl upon each knee.
He was frankly hugging them and they were as frankly pulling greenbacks out of his pockets and tucking them into their stockings, conveniently rolled.
“Here’s civilization in America at its highest,” said Levin cynically. “The fat man is a manufacturer who has been yelling against the Bolsheviki for destroying the home. He’s a bitter opponent of free love.”
McCall laughed.
“Well, why shouldn’t he be opposed to free love? He has to pay for it, doesn’t he? He looks like a picture by Hogarth—a picture in the Rake’s Progress. Only Death ought to be lurking somewhere about.”
“Oh, he is,” said Levin, “although you can’t see him. Life doesn’t reveal its spectres until the right moment. But we’re all too introspective. A cabaret is frankly a place for enjoyment. We ought to dance.”
“I’d rather just look on,” said Hamilton.
“And I’m going to dance,” said McCall. “Watch me!”
He lurched unsteadily past the fat man and his odalisques to a table where two dazzling blondes—a peroxide and a henna—sat waiting. The next minute he was fox-trotting with the peroxide blonde. The fat man and the two girls rose and went laughing and swaying out of the door. Another officer sat down with the henna blonde. A couple walked by, the woman’s black eyes beckoning to Hamilton, while her escort was looking the other way. The waiter yawned. Hamilton looked at his watch.
“Wow, it’s after three! We’ll have to catch the four o’clock to make reveille and then we won’t get any sleep.”
“Do you still have to stand reveille?” asked Levin.
“Oh, I’ve got a couple of shavetails who take turns at standing it with the company—and for all I know they may leave it to the topsergeant. But our major’s a little fussy. Doesn’t know the war’s over, and he might kick.”
“Well, you get McCall, and in the meantime I’ll order a round of coffees. That’ll keep you awake until reveille, and then you can sleep.”
Hamilton found McCall making arrangements with the lady in henna, the other officer and the peroxide blonde to visit a little apartment uptown, but dragged him away. McCall refused to drink his coffee, but finally consented to leave and walked out between them to the taxi.
They drove to the Pennsylvania station and Levin saw them to the gates leading to their track.
“Let’s see, what was that address?” asked Hamilton.
“Miss Meadows? Here it is. Better write it down. Got a pencil? All right. Well, so long. Look me up again. Come to see me when you’re in Chicago. Good-night, McCall.”
Hamilton was lying leisurely on his bed, smoking a cigarette and reading a letter from Margaret, when McCall burst into the room.
“Got my order! Got my order!” he shouted, waving a slip of paper. “Hooray! Kaloo! Kalay! Come on, Hamilton, help me pack.”
“Gee, great stuff!” said Hamilton, jumping up. “When did it come?”
“Just now! Hooray! I haven’t packed a thing. I’m going to take my physical exam at eleven and catch the noon train, if I can. It’s halfpast nine now.”
“Have you signed your statement that you’re free from indebtedness?”
“Almost forgot. But I can do it and make the train, anyway. Come on, old top, give me a lift!”
Together they hurried out of the room and down the row of wooden barracks. McCall was talking excitedly.
“No more of these damned barracks, all looking alike,” he said. “That’s the worst thing about the camp. Every blamed building looks like every other building. If they’d only make one a little longer than the other. Or even get the lines crooked. Or paint ’em.”
In McCall’s room they found two privates folding an iron cot.
“That’s right, boys. Get all this junk out and sweep the floor when you get through. Here’s a couple of uniforms I won’t need any more. Want ’em? Fine! And here’s a pair of putts. I’ll see you in the office again before I go.”
The soldiers saluted with a relaxed stiffness and broad grins on their faces, turned on their heels and walked out.
“Why did you want to give away your uniforms and putts?” asked Hamilton. “You can use ’em for riding or camping, you know.”
“Riding or camping? Here, hand me those shaving things off that shelf. When do you think I’ll have a chance to go riding? If they ever send me on an assignment where I’ll need putts—such as covering another war I’ll buy a pair. But, of course, there won’t be any more wars. Let’s see, where’ll I put my socks?”
Hamilton was removing articles from a wooden shelf that extended over the foot of the bed—a few photographs, books, stationery, brush, comb, a soap box, a tobacco pouch, a shoe brush and some face towels. As he picked up one of the volumes, a snapshot, which had been kept between the leaves, fluttered down upon the floor and Hamilton stooped to recover it. It was Dorothy Meadows, standing at the entrance to the hospital in Paris—Dorothy in her nurse’s cloak and bonnet, smiling at him. McCall looked up from his packing.
“Whatis that?” he asked. “Oh, one of my snapshots.”
“Where’d you get this?” asked Hamilton, his face red from bending.
“In Paris. Took it with her camera. You know she’s been an angel of mercy to us, Hamilton.”
Hamilton’s mind went back to the New York cabaret, where McCall had sat reciting poetry with shining eyes, and an emotion strangely like that of jealousy seized him. He thought of their walk in Luxembourg gardens. Of course it could not be jealousy. Still the feeling persisted and he hardly heard what McCall was saying. If he had not been in love with Margaret, this feeling would be understandable. As it was, it was fantastic. Perhaps McCall had not written the poem to Dorothy.
